Tricia Thompson, MS, RD

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Gluten Free Watchdog Statement on Gluten-Free Cheerios

Excerpt from the post at Gluten Free Watchdog:

“I recently traveled to General Mills to meet with the people responsible for bringing gluten-free Cheerios to market. Cheerios labeled gluten-free will be arriving on supermarket shelves soon (identifiable by the gluten-free statement in the lower right hand corner of the box). The information provided below is based on my visit to General Mills and the testing data shared with me by the company. When gluten-free Cheerios are available, Gluten Free Watchdog will be testing the “yellow box” variety. Once our testing is complete, another statement will be released.

Gluten Free Watchdog current position on oats

Gluten Free Watchdog continues to support the use of gluten-free oats by the celiac disease community that are produced under a gluten-free purity protocol*. The oats used in gluten-free Cheerios are not currently grown under a purity protocol; they are “cleaned” via mechanical sorting. At this time we do not in general support the use of regular commodity oats that are cleaned via mechanical and/or optical sorting to be “gluten-free” after arriving at the mill.

*There are differences in protocols followed by various suppliers of gluten-free oats but they all begin with pure oat seed. Please see the end of this post for a few of the protocols used to produce gluten-free oats.”